Avatar: Seven Havens Full Book One Review - Hope in a Ruined World
“My whole life I’ve lived in fear! Scared of what I really am! But I’m sick of being afraid! I am the Avatar!”
Pavi announces this in the finale, and it lands because the show has spent thirteen episodes earning it. In the first episode she was a 9-year-old orphan scrounging for scraps in Ellora, talking to the inanimate objects she kept around because she had no one else to talk to. By the finale, she has unlocked her root chakra and defeated the Anomaly. It is a long road to cover in a single season, and I think Avatar: Seven Havens covers it with more care than anyone had a right to expect.
It has been twelve years since The Legend of Korra ended, and this series’ return (along with Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender earlier this year) could easily have been a mere nostalgia exercise. Instead, it chose the more interesting path. The story leaps 225 years past Korra’s finale into a world that is almost unrecognizable. The Four Nations are gone. An environmental cataclysm has left a wasteland, and humanity has retreated into walled city-states, the seven havens of the title. The Avatar, once revered as the bridge between worlds, is now a bogeyman. That is a bold inversion, and what keeps it from being merely clever is the girl at its center.
Pavi, voiced by Saheli Khan, is even younger than Aang was when we first met him, and the series understands what that means. Her reluctance is not only fear of being hunted. It is loneliness, self-doubt, and a wish to remain a wandering kid with no roots and therefore nothing to lose. Khan gives her a softness that never tips into weakness. The writing lets us love her before we are asked to worry about her, and it keeps her at the center even as the story widens.
The season’s real subject, as it gradually becomes clear, is what fear can lead people to do in the name of survival, often to the detriment of that survival. The world blames Korra and the Avatar for its ruin, and the show traces how that belief spreads. Jae, a Brigade bender who also becomes a protector of the Avatar through the White Lotus, hides his loyalties from his boyfriend, Datu, who believes the anti-Avatar propaganda as much as anyone. Here is fear at its most insidious, not in sandstorms or armies but inside a relationship, where each person protects a secret from the one he trusts most. And in Chancellor Kayoko, the season gives us the logical end of that fear: a ruler intoxicated by the prospect of absolute power, who hates the Avatar because the Avatar threatens her control. Her fascist tendencies come as no surprise for a character who seemed to singlehandedly wield all political power in Ellora, but the show lets those tendencies curdle without letting her become a caricature.
The season’s emotional spine is the bond between Pavi and her twin sister, Nisha, voiced by Aishu Devan. Nisha seems to have the stronger command of the elements and is brash and impulsive. Pavi’s bending appears to be less advanced at first, but she has the patience to connect with others. “What Lies Beneath” sends them underground, where they glimpse memories of Korra destroying Republic City. I previously wrote that I suspected this was misdirection, and I still believe that to be true. But the series has not abandoned the idea that the powerful manufacture the stories that their people believe, and I remain hopeful that Korra will get her due.
When Nisha reveals herself as the Avatar and must flee Ellora, the show separates its sisters, a bold choice that lets each girl face her own test, but the final episodes are where the girls are truly torn apart. When the truth of the girls’ past comes out, Pavi cannot forgive Nisha, and she channels that betrayal into unlocking her root chakra. Ultimately, Pavi could not have saved Ellora without what she learned about her sister, and Nisha stays behind to help rebuild the haven she once endangered. She is reckless and unstable, but she still chooses, day after day, to be good. It is a fine piece of characterization, and it gives the next season somewhere to go.
The craft deserves praise. The Harshlands are drawn in warm oranges and pinks, a haunted, almost Saharan beauty unlike any earlier Avatar series. The creatures are delightful, from cat-monkeys to cameldillos. Ellora’s arches and towers draw on South Asian architecture, and the food, names, and music carry that influence throughout. Jeremy Zuckerman’s score adds electronic textures and South Asian vocals to the franchise’s familiar mysticism. The result is new Avatar that still feels like Avatar.
Still, the finale leaves its hero exactly where the first promotional art promised us a year ago: Pavi, with Jae and her cat-monkey companion Geet at her side, setting out across a damaged world, much in the spirit of The Last Airbender. She travels now to unblock the world’s chakras. Her next destination is the Floating Isles, and presumably the water chakra, which we know from earlier seasons is the source of pleasure and is blocked by guilt. After a finale in which the sisters’ bond has been tested by unimaginable guilt, I can think of nothing more fitting, or more promising.
Twelve years was a long time to wait for a new season of Avatar. Seven Havens was worth it. It is a patient, absorbing season about a young girl who finally refuses to be afraid, and it has the wisdom to know that hope in a ruined world is no small thing. I cannot wait to see where Pavi goes.